Ahead of election, cyber-attacks cripple online media

April 19, 2011 4:23 PM ET

Bangkok,
April 19, 2011--The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned by
cyber-attacks against three news and commentary sites that preceded Saturday's important
election in Malaysia's Sarawak state, on the island of Borneo. The country's
main news portal Malaysiakini, Sarawak Report, and the Malay and English versions of the opposition Harakahdaily website all reported
similar attacks. Nobody has taken responsibility for them.

The distributed denial of
service (DDoS) attacks forced the sites to publish through alternative domain
names and platforms, according to local
and international
news reports. DDoS attacks typically coordinate hundreds of thousands of
computers to send or demand data from a single website, causing its connection
to the Internet to choke up or the server to crash.

"Malaysian authorities used to
tout their commitment to a censorship-free Internet, but their silence over
these cyber-attacks has been deafening," said Shawn
Crispin, CPJ's senior Southeast Asia
representative. "We call upon the authorities to launch an independent
investigation into these attacks."

Malaysia's traditional print and broadcast media are closely
linked with the country's ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition. In recent
years, online news sites and blogs have evolved as the alternative to the
state-controlled media. (See CPJ's Malaysia's Risk Takers
report on the country's online situation.)

On April 10, Sarawak Report's website was shut by a widespread
attack and remained off-line for three days until its operators were able to
establish their new domain name. The news and commentary site had published
several critical exposes about Sarawak Chief Minister Taib Mahmud and his
family's extensive business interests.

Taib, who has led the
resource-rich state since 1981, is politically aligned with the Barisan
Nasional coalition. Sarawak Report's
London-based founder, Clare Rewcastle Brown, told Malaysian
media she believed that the BN might have been responsible for the attacks.

Malaysiakini was forced shut on April 12 by DDoS attacks that the
site says originated from overseas and overwhelmed its locally hosted servers,
according to local and international reports. The on-line news provider
continued publishing through other Internet-based platforms, including Facebook
and WordPress, and was able to restore its website through the use of
alternative servers on April 14. CPJ
has reported more than 35 times on attacks on Malaysiakini since 1999.

Premesh Chandran, the site's chief
executive, told the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation that Malaysiakini had published several reports on
"corruption within Sarawak's ruling regime"
ahead of the cyber-attacks.

According
to other local media, The
Harakahdaily website is closely linked to the opposition Pan-Malaysian
Islamic Party. It frequently reposts Malaysiakini
and Sarawak Report articles.

The anonymous cyber-attacks
coincide with growing official curbs on Malaysia's Internet, including
government harassment of independent bloggers and on-line commentators. Last
September, police arrested and charged with sedition Malaysiakini cartoonist Zulkifli Anwar Ulhaque
before the release of a collection of his political cartoons, which had
previously been published on-line.

In March, a Malaysian court dropped criminal
charges brought by state power company Tenaga against blogger
Irwan Abdul Rahman for a satirical entry he posted on his nose4news blog. The charges were
brought by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), the
state agency created to oversee the online media industry and to uphold the
government's no-censorship policy for on-line content first announced in 1996.

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